Boating is a very popular activity for many people. Some activities include traveling, fishing, cruising, and lounging. Boats are also used in commerce for transporting goods between destinations. Inland waterways and rivers are frequently traveled by boats and other watercraft. At times boaters may desire to navigate the boat out into the open waters of an adjacent lake or ocean. Accordingly it is desirable to travel from one body of water to another.
Some methods of transporting watercraft include boatlifts that pick the watercraft out from one body of water and place it into another body of water. However, these types of devices are not suitable for all types of watercraft, including boats that have masts, e.g. sailboats and yachts. These types of devices may also be limited by the size of the boats that the devices can lift.
One such device is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,947,639 by the inventors of the embodiments of the subject invention. This patent discusses a new and improved boat lift capable of transporting a boat between two bodies of water in both a vertical and horizontal direction. The boatlift allows a boat to bypass various barriers in an efficient and safe manner by vertically lifting the boat out of one body of water, translating the boat horizontally over a desired barrier, and then vertically lowering the boat into a second body of water. Still, these devices require a significant amount of mechanical and structural framework that is susceptible to wear requiring maintenance.
Salt water or brackish water and fresh water are separated by various types of barriers. Barriers may be desired to separate these water bodies due to the various types of organisms, plants and animals which can only survive in either salt or fresh water, but not both. Regardless of the need to isolate salt from fresh water, boats and other types of water vehicles still require access to and from these separate bodies of water.
Canals provide means for transporting boats from one body of water to another. The Panama Canal, for example, was constructed to provide a shortened route between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Canals may utilize locks that raise and lower boats transporting the craft between water ways of different elevations. However, these devices do not prevent the water of one body from mixing with another body of water.
In light thereof, it would be desirable to have a watercraft transport system that obviates the deficiencies in the prior art, including transporting a boat or other watercraft from one body of water to another without mixing the water between the two bodies. The embodiments of the subject invention accomplish this task.